Miss C Santos Perez v Beaumont Juicer & Deli Limited — 2020

The claim was heard by Employment Judge Davidson in the claimant's absence and without attendance by the respondent. The tribunal decided to proceed under the overriding objective, noting that it would be disproportionate to relist the matter for a third hearing given the amounts involved and the length of time the sums had been outstanding. The tribunal had the respondent's ET3 and email correspondence about arrears of pay before it.

On the evidence, the tribunal accepted that the respondent paid the claimant £9 per hour and that she worked 482 hours in total. The papers were difficult to reconcile because the ET3's hourly breakdown did not match the amounts said to have been paid, and the tribunal noted that the sums described in the ET3 as gross payments were in fact the net amounts received in the claimant's bank account. The absence of proper payslips also made the position harder to determine.

The tribunal found that the respondent had deducted a week's pay and refused holiday pay because it considered the claimant had not given a week's notice. It held that the contractual notice period was actually 48 hours because the claimant had less than three months' service, and that there was no contractual term permitting deductions from wages for failure to give notice. The tribunal also said that, if such a clause existed, it was likely to be unenforceable as a penalty rather than a genuine pre-estimate of loss. It did not need to decide whether the claimant's alleged failure to give notice was justified by an alleged prior breach by the respondent.

The tribunal awarded £306 gross for arrears of pay, being 34 hours for which the claimant had received no pay, and £513 for holiday pay, calculated by reference to the proportion of the holiday year worked and the fact that the claimant had taken no holiday during that period.